Page 148 - Cyberculture and New Media

Nicole Anderson and Nathaniel Stern 139
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representable; it is instead a recognition that what is present in writing is
there in its absence. As deconstruction shows us, the designation of identities
or the representation of things as things (for example, bodies as objects of
knowledge) can only be accomplished by “forgetting” that every
representation is haunted by what Derrida calls the “impossible” - “that
which exceeds and at the same time is at the heart of representational
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logic.” “By inscribing significations, we exscribe the presence of what
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withdraws from all significations, being itself (life, passion, matter …).
We could say then, paraphrasing Nancy, that bodies are not un-
representable; they are rather presented as “exscribed.” As such, bodies “take
place neither in discourse nor in matter … they take place at the limit, as the
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limit.”
In touching and being touched (in interacting) we encounter the
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limit, or what Baross describes as the “in-between par excellence.” Since
“to touch” is always “shared in-between,” “touch is always already reciprocal
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…” “If we accept the claims made by Derrida and Baross that the ‘self’
comes into being only in and through the sensuous relation with the other, in
and through exposure to the limit, to that which is not self (but is nevertheless
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internal to it), then we can see how touch,” and by extension the body, is
not simply an object of the self’s perceiving consciousness (or an expression
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of its affective interiority), but is also a body in and through exscription.
This figuration of touch moves us outside of the humanism of the
tradition (of, for example, Merleau-Ponty where touch always privileges the
human hand and in fact is central to the definition of humanness), and allows
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us to explore the non-human aspect of touch. What sets Nancy’s thinking
apart in this regard “is the way it locates the technical supplement, the
expropriation of the proper by the prosthetic, right at the phenomenological
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threshold of the lived or proper body.” “[I]t is the thinking of a technè of
bodies as thinking of the prosthetic supplement [not addition] that will mark
the greatest difference, it seems to me, between Nancy’s discourse and other
more or less contemporary discourses about the “body proper” or ‘flesh’. 149
At the heart of touching is the intrusion of technics - the syncope 150
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introduced by “body ecotechnics.” (This is a world of bodies “neither
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transcendental nor immanent.”)
In order for something to appear as a determinate something “there
must exist a limit or border by which both the identity and difference of the
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thing are constituted.” Coming into touch with something - coming into
contact with the limit that enables something to take place - produces a body.
A body that is multiple in its circulation of touches and separations as it
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divides and relates to itself and others multiply.
Being bodily (being bodily as implicit rather than explicit)
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implicates an exteriority “in ‘me’” but “everything is outside another
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outside.” Derrida elaborates: “the being outside an other outside forms the